Watched the above episode of Richard Dawkins new documentary last night - I was not impressed.
Although I agree entirely with Dawkins that Darwin was a genius, and that evolution is one of the most ground breaking and powerful explanatory theories within science, I simply cannot abide his anti-religion rhetoric. Is he not aware of any of the scholarship regarding the interplay between science and faith? Has he not paid any attention to his numerous discussions with people like Alistair McGrath?
Yet again Dawkins produces a polemical program that does nothing to further the debate. I imagine all the internet atheists will be jumping up and down waving their flags whilst the YECS re-double their anti-science efforts. Meanwhile those of us who are actually interested in the subject can do nothing but shake our heads and gear ourselves up for the inevitable pub conversation about how evolution has "disproved" religion... sigh.
Hi, Chrisci
ReplyDeleteIs it just me, or do I sense there has been a huge over-reaction by religious folks to this programs? From reading reviews in newspapers I had expected a truly horrendous piece of polemic, with Dawkins in aggressive anti-religion mode, as he undoubtedly is in "The God Delusion". I expected to be told that there was a simple choice between evolution/atheism and belief in God/rejection of science.
I don't feel Dawkins said that. He makes it clear that it's the reason he's an atheist - but in the end all he said was that the scientific explanation meant you didn't have to invoke God as an explanation. That's not the same as saying that evolution disproved God.
In fact the end of the program showed the children in the class, most of whom said that they believed in evolution, but they still believed in God. This seemed quite even-handed to me.
Where I would take exception was to Dawkins's statement that evolution is nothing less than a complete explanation for all the diversity and complexity of life.
At best, surely it can be described as the framework within which we look for explanations as to how this or that feature came into existence. The evidence for it having happened elsewhere is so overwhelming that it has to be the best theory to look for explanations of how, say the bacterial flagellum evolved.
But the fact is that there are still things that we don't yet know how they evolved - but we're working on it. Since the picture is therefore incomplete, I think it's an exaggeration to say it's a complete explanation.
Hi - thanks for leaving a comment.
ReplyDeleteThis whole discussion gets extremely muddled because Dawkins conflates a strong argument - that evolution is a great explanatory paradigm for Biology - with an unrelated conclusion - therefore God doesn't exist. Time and again throughout the program he repeated that evolution is an alternative to believing that God created. This is simply not correct. Evolution is an alternative to say intelligent design or young earth creationism, but disproving one of these theories is not the same as trying to disprove God.
I think the disappointment of this program was in the hope that Dawkins was going to talk about Darwin and Evolution without his out-breaks of anti-religious tourettes syndrome.